bogeyandruby

I am currently reading Margaret Atwood’s latest tome: Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, and absolutely loving it. The details she offers in this autobiography are mind-boggling considering I barely remember what I did on the weekend.

For example, she recalls her high school home economics classes including her experience directing and acting in a home economics opera that starred: Orlon, Nylon and Dacron. Her brilliance was evident even then.

In another unrelated passage she is sixteen years old and crossing the school football field on her way home when she has an epiphany that she will become a writer. But it’s not the becoming a writer part that struck me, perhaps because that is obvious at this point. Rather, it is the description of the dress she is wearing, one that she made herself, that I find so impressive: « It was pink. It had a princess line, cap sleeves and a shirred bodice decorated with an ornamental gold button. » Cue wistful sigh …

I am fairly certain I took home-economics in high school, sometime in the mid-70s. Or did I? Apart from hemming slacks or sewing on a button, I haven’t got a clue how to sew. Did we learn in class? If we did, I didn’t retain anything. I definitely didn’t learn how to cook or darn a sock or grocery shop for a family.

I do remember one assignment where we had to make a model kitchen. I worked so hard on that project, quite unlike me, not being very artsy in those days, and made an exact replica of my parents’ kitchen, right down to the last detail. To my disappointment, I promptly lost two points, scoring 48/50 (I remember that detail) because I placed the fridge next to the oven. « That makes no sense. », the teacher argued when I explained I had used the family kitchen as a model. My parents obviously took this criticism seriously and moved the oven, now combined with the stove, a cupboard’s length away from the fridge when they renovated their kitchen in 1996.

If there was one skill I took away from home-ec class, it was how to measure accurately. I remember the teacher instructing us to get down to eye level and to check for the bevel in the liquid. An eye-level bevel, if you prefer. It was the bevel, or slight dip in the liquid, that had to line up with the desired line on the measuring cup. The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes a bevel as 1. : the angle that one surface or line makes with another when they are not at right angles. 2. : the slant of a bevel.

Liquid or solid, I have been a measuring perfectionist ever since, at least when it comes to baking, driving everyone around me crazy with my insistence that a third cup of flour cannot be eyeballed in a container meant to measure a quarter cup or even one cup. Instructions for heaping amounts makes me anxious. Is your heap subjectively the same size as mine? Mixing shortbread until crumbly begs clarification for how does one measure crumbly? Separating eggs? Pass me the egg separator.

Cooking is art but baking is pure chemistry. Mess with the ingredients and you will fail and your souffle may fall. I bake only tried and true recipes designed to succeed and to feed many. Not too many ingredients, no vague instructions, and preferably measurements that are not metric.

My mother, notorious for using an old plastic cup devoid of increments for all her baking, was a poor model.

My husband guesstimates too, but not when I am supervising. Oh, and he never uses a timer either, preferring his baking (and toast) in the form of burnt offerings.

Truly, I owe all my baking skills, and by extension probably my chemistry marks, to my high school home economics class. Perhaps if I hadn’t become fixed on the bevel, I would also be a whiz at hosting dinner parties.

Circling back to Margaret Atwood, she who can not only sew a dress and put on an opera, but who can also start a fire, handle a snake and write a whole bunch of wonderful books, not to mention poetry. Did her career start with home economics? Should I have paid more attention in class? If I had, would I have a novel under my belt by now?

Does anyone remember what home economics was all about in the 70s? Do they still teach those skills in school?

**************************************************************

Margaret Atwood also credits Brownies with teaching her life skills. I got my baking badge in Brownies, (or was it Girl Guides?), making hot cross buns. I’d never eaten hot cross buns before. The candied fruit made me nauseous when I tasted the end result. To this day, the thought of candied fruit makes me ill. On the plus side, I learned the Lord’s Prayer by heart thanks to Brownies and so don’t feel too left out during Christian ceremonies.

**************************************************************

The other night Ian was helping me with some baking and I handed him the 3/4 measuring cup instead of the one cup. It was a test. Thankfully, he realized his error and cleverly added another 1/4 cup of flour to the mix.

**************************************************************

I need a little person’s kitchen with lower counters. I am tired of standing on a stool to bake. My childhood dream that never came true was to get an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas. I looked them up the other day and the modern version looks nothing like the oven in my home-ec model kitchen project. ☹️